Sunday, January 30, 2011

Social Media In South Africa

When researching for social media resources in South Africa I was surprised to find how easy it was to find statistics and information on this topic. Normally when Africa comes to mind we think about lack of technology and struggle, but from what I found there seems to have been an increase in this area since the early 90's.

Of the opinions I found there were varying points of view. Some saying that social media in South Africa would take many years to catch on, especially for advertising. Others were talking about how even though they are behind when compared to other countries, South Africa was catching up and advertising was plausible through social media, especially through Facebook.

Some specific issues that South Africa has are the still lacking broadband capabilities in the country and how, although it is slowly improving, there is still a wide socio-economic gap in the populace. This last point deals with how many of the social media users are part of the wealthy group as opposed to the poorer populace.

One of my sources goes into great detail on how the popularity of the FIFA World Cup plays into the social media uprising in South Africa. This one time event for South Africa brought an immediate increase in social networking and how people in South Africa communicated with the rest of the world.

Over all we should expect South Africa to continue increasing in its social media prowess. All signs show that it is increasing exponentially in all areas, especially in Facebook.